Book Review: Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America by Elliot Jaspin

New York: Basic Books (2007)
ISBN 9780465036363
341 pp., Hardbound, $26.95.

Journalist Elliot Jaspin opens his new book, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America, with a blurred black and white photograph of a small crowd of well dressed men. The men stand at attention amidst livestock, buggies, and houses. The image itself reveals very little about the purpose and intention of these men save for its caption: ‘‘Minutes after two black men were publicly executed in Forsyth Country, Georgia, for the rape and murder of eighteen-year old Mae Crow. . .’’ The caption goes on to explain that ‘‘[a]lthough some blacks watched the hanging (lower right-hand corner), within a few weeks nearly every Negro had been driven from the county.’’ This photograph begins Jaspin’s historical and anecdotal account of a silenced and violent American past—one that he names ‘‘racial cleansing,’’ an adaptation of the late twentieth-century term, ‘‘ethnic cleansing,’’ to the American experience. Jaspin collapses the historical language used to describe these events—race riots and lynching—into this term. In doing so, he offers a way to discuss these tragic occurrences in a manner that resonates with the discourses of the contemporary moment. As such, he creates historical narratives that reveal terrors present on American soil.

With the help of archival work, inter- views, census data, and local histories, Jaspin pieces together the fragmented stories of entire towns and counties. He gathers the, at times convergent and at other times divergent, stories of local whites and the African-American women, men, and children forcibly and violently expelled from their homes throughout both northern and southern states by their white neighbors and/or employers. What his research reveals is that these expulsions and killings—racial cleansings— were geographically widespread. Even though these cleansings were not limited to the chosen areas of discussion, Jaspin discusses those counties in Indiana, Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina, in which the African-American population dropped substantially over a short period of time— ‘‘a few months at most’’ (6). Despite the wide geographic distribution of these changes, the reasons provided for the violence were often the same: the threat of an interracially competitive job market or the alleged rape or murder of a white woman. For each county, the end result was also the same: violence, death, and the elimination and/or forced movement of all of its African-American population.

Each of Jaspin’s ten chapters, chronologically arranged, tells the story of a town that inspired its county to rid itself of an African-American community. Each chapter begins with a map that locates both the county and the town in relation to larger metropolitan areas in and around the state. Even though Jaspin offers a geographical context within which we might understand the circumstances that lead to the cleansings, his historical contextualization sometimes falls short. The anecdotal evidence, the interviews, and the census data offer powerful local accounts but, fail to locate these events within a larger sociopolitical framework. As such, Jaspin excludes the larger social recognition of these horrific events. Even the ethnographic and sociological work on lynching and race riots of Ida B. Wells-Barnett goes unacknowledged. Jaspin’s critique of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and his critique of Du Bois, as editor of the NAACP’s Crisis maga- zine, describes both as ‘‘silent’’ on the issue of racial cleansing (154; 162). What Jaspin fails to mention is the ongoing activism and social commentary by Wells-Barnett, Du Bois, and others who worked to dismantle the system that quietly and publicly encouraged this form of mob violence. There is no mention in this narrative of the organization’s successful anti-lynching campaign and their other political strategies to protect African Americans and fight against these actions.

Although neither Du Bois nor Wells- Barnett use the term that Jaspin sets forth, ‘‘racial cleansing,’’ it is historically clear that Du Bois offered more than ‘‘silence’’ on the issue. In W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography of a Race, David Levering Lewis chronicles Du Bois’s activism against the white supremacy that encouraged the mob violence, which led to lynchings and racial cleansings. Jaspin’s criticism of the NAACP and Du Bois is misleading in that it fails to account for the ways in which such acts of ‘‘racial cleansing’’ were described at that time.

Despite its historical and contextual shortcomings, Jaspin offers an important means of speaking about these events in a manner that makes genocide and ethnic cleansing an American problem. In a day when the words ‘‘terror,’’ ‘‘terrorism,’’ and genocide invoke images of distant lands, Jaspin asks us to remember a ‘‘terror’’ that pit American against American. Amidst the collective silence, his accounts name a terrorism that still prevents African Americans from traveling alone through certain counties and cities in the United States. Jaspin makes clear in his ‘‘Conclusion: Esta’s Gift’’ that this terrorism is not limited to mob violence or even to the cleansing itself. It also includes the widespread silence, encouraged both by the participants and by the print media that collectively have refused to accurately remember these events. Jaspin criticizes the reporting of his employer, Cox Newspapers, and its ‘‘flagship’’ newspaper the Atlanta Journal-Consitution for its representation of the racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia. Certainly, this criticism can be applied to other media sources that maintain this silence. Buried in the Bitter Waters: the Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America shatters this silence and presents an important history that no longer rests in our collective social memory.

Reviewed by Tara Bynum

Johns Hopkins University